E.N. Goody, ‘Learning, apprenticeship and the division of labor’, in Apprenticeship: from theory to method and back again, ed. M.W. Coy, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1989; J. Lave, ‘The culture of acquisition and the practice of understanding’, in Cultural psychology: essays on comparative human development, eds J.W. Stigler, R.A. Shweder and G. Herdt, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990; F. Sigaut,

R. Taruskin, The pastness of the present and the presence of the past’, in Authenticity and early music, ed. N. Kenyon, New York, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 144; H. Haskell, The early music revival: a history, London, Thames & Hudson, 1988; and R. Leppard, Authenticity in music, London, Faber Music, 1988, give analogous views. On pre-industrial and modern soundscapes, see R.M. Schafer, The tuning of the world, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1977.

For example, H. Ehrlichman and J.N. Halpern, Affect and memory: effects of pleasant and unpleasant odors on retrieval of happy and unhappy memories’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 55, 1988, pp. 769-79; F.R. Schab, ‘Odors and the remembrance of things past’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 16,1990, pp. 648-55.

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A. Gell, ‘Magic, perfume, dream’, in Symbols and sentiments, ed. I. Lewis, London, Academic Press, 1977; J. Siegel, ‘Images and odors in Javanese practices surrounding death’, Indonesia 36, 1983, pp. 1-14; D. Howes, ‘Olfaction and transition: an essay on the ritual uses of smell’, Revue Canadienne de Sociologie et Anthropologie 24, 1987, pp. 398-416. The geographer D.W. Gade coined the term ‘smellscape’ to counter European and American geographers’ lack of attention to the odours of places, which he associates in part with a general cultural bias against acknowledging odours; see his ‘Redolence and land use on Nosy Be, Madagascar’, Journal of Cultural Geography 4, 1984, pp. 29-40.

K. Basso, “‘Stalking with stories”: names, places and moral narrative among the Western Apache’, in Text, play and story: the construction and reconstruction of self and society, ed. E.M. Bruner, Washington, DC, American Ethnological Society, 1984, pp. 19-55.

H. Eilberg-Schwartz, The savage in Judaism: an anthropology of Israelite religion and ancient Judaism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990, Part I; J. Boyarin, Storm from paradise: the politics of Jewish memory, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

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M.J. Carruthers shows the interconnections between new print technologies and changing ideas and practices concerning memory, reason, and moral regeneration; see The book of memory: a study of memory in medieval culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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Research on immunology and new reproductive technologies suggests radical changes in people’s experiences of their bodily boundaries. See E. Martin, Toward an anthropology of immunology: the body as nation state’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 4, 1990, pp. 410-26; M. Strathern, Reproducing the future: essays on anthropology, kinship and the new reproductive technologies, New York, Routledge, 1992.

At one point in his initial argument for the motion ‘aesthetics is a cross-cultural category’, Jeremy Coote remarks on the spate of anthropological monographs that have appeared in the past few years with the word ‘aesthetics’ in their titles, and he wonders why this word so rarely appeared in such titles before, say, 1970. Undeniably, social science and anthropology have recently been seized by a concern with aesthetics (and also poetics). The reasons for this have to do, I think, with current theorizing about modernity and modernism, and the place of anthropology and of social theorizing in general, within late twentieth-century Western culture and society.

Broadly speaking, we can identify three connected phenomena of the late twentieth century. First, we have witnessed the emergence of mass, globalized media, particularly in their visual forms of television, video and film. Second, because instantaneous global communications are obliterating the temporal intervals between events and their communication and witnessing, we experience a suppression of time, a phenomenon made more pronounced by the ease with which artefacts, practices, languages and events from varying historical and temporal frames are now juxtaposed in our everyday life. Finally, as a consequence of this, we now commonly experience a suppression of space too, a virtualization of spatial perceptions and relationships, so that relations of proximity and remoteness have to be simulated through global media rather than appealed to in terms of absolute geographic distance.

The combination of this universalization of televised representations of the world with our dominant global political motif, nationalism, has powerfully enhanced the aestheticization of politics which has been such a key component of twentieth-century modernism in Europe and North America. Nationalism inevitably depends heavily on imagery—on myth, on visual icons and display, on state theatre and ceremonial, all of which make it intrinsically interesting to anthropology. Nationalism and culture are of course intimately connected, and appeals made in the interests of national identity often resemble the arguments with which anthropologists justify their identification of culture. In anthropology, the aestheticization of politics becomes the aestheticization of culture and indeed of the social itself.

Considered in terms of its practical effects on the conduct of our everyday lives, our dependence upon global media encourages us to make everything into an issue of representation and self-representation, and of image manipulation, management and achieved consensus. This transformation in our representational practices has also affected our anthropology, and has led many to consider culture and social life likewise in terms of representation and self-representation. And although this aestheticization does not, except perhaps tangentially in Alfred Gell’s comments, enter into the present debate, it is well to set the debate in the context of these broad developments, for they are indicated all along the way.

Howard Morphy, proposing the motion, and Joanna Overing, opposing it, begin by almost perfectly characterizing Kant’s two treatments of the concept of aesthetic in his First and Third Critiques respectively. Morphy maintains that aesthetics is about how the human sensory capacity construes and gives form to stimuli. Overing speaks of aesthetics as the judgement of beauty and of taste, of the ‘pure’ aesthetic as such, and regards it as a phenomenon of European modernism not automatically applicable to non-Western societies.

The two seconders maintain this contrast between the transcendental and the pure Kantian aesthetic, but in a way that reverses the respective positions of the proposers. For now we find Jeremy Coote, seconding the motion, arguing that if the Dinka and Yoruba people themselves appeal, in their own vocabulary (as do Overing’s Piaroa), to ideas of beauty and grace, then this fact alone should convince us that aesthetic categories have cross-cultural applicability. This point was further emphasized during the discussion by Marcus Banks. He observes that all of the participants in the debate have carried out their ethnographic work in ‘non-state societies’ and that, had any of them worked in the complex societies of Asia (for example in India and China) where aesthetic discourse and theory are well developed and have a long history unaffected by anything modernist or European, then the motion would have appeared literally uncontestable.

However, Peter Gow, seconding the opposition to the motion, responds to Banks and in so doing draws the two Kantian notions of aesthetic into a closer relation by appealing, after Bourdieu, to the idea of distinction or discrimination. While, on the one hand, the categories of intuition and cognition combine to give human beings the capacity to make distinctions between objects, on the other hand, the history and theory of art and aesthetics provide people in the West with the practices and vocabulary by which to make the judgements that underlie and instaurate their social and class distinctions. This is what is distinctive about our aesthetic discourse. Gow concludes from this that our aesthetic practice is always to make such distinctions, to make judgements. To the extent that anthropology’s whole rationale is to avoid making such judgements—the most salient in this context being the judging of a culture in terms of its capacity to produce beautiful things—then it must be anathema to anthropology.

I would like to depart here from the precedent of editorial impartiality, and take a stand myself. I think that in hindsight, Gow’s was probably the argument that clinched victory for the opposers of the motion. For it drew attention away from what I believe was a snag in Overing’s initial argument. This snag concerned an issue that seemed to weave its way through the entire debate: that of contextualization. Overing objects to the modernist aesthetic because it aspires to remove the art object from its situatedness in the world. Among the Piaroa, she observes, considerations of the beauty of objects are inseparable from questions about their utility and their everyday productive potency. But she maintains that the anthropology of art, still seeped in the modernist sensibility of the transcendence of the art object, finds ‘the idea of the everyday utility of objects of art…odious’.

During the debate, however, Sonia Greger made the important point that in the Third Critique, Kant was not talking about the autonomy of the aesthetic object in terms of those contemporary notions of judgement to which Bourdieu and Gow appeal. Kant believed that the art object had ‘purposiveness without purpose’. He wanted to know precisely why the art object could not be an object of judgement in the normal sense. That is, he was addressing the issue of transcendence without which, as Gell’s recent article on Trobriand art makes clear, 1the work of art allows us no perspective at all on the everyday. And to return to my initial observations, it is only because, quite unlike the essentially nineteenth-century modernist aesthetic that Overing invokes as her straw man, our current late twentieth-century life has been so thoroughly aestheticized, that our sensitivity to what Baudrillard calls ‘critical transcendence’—which he could only mean in this original Kantian sense—has disappeared. Art is dead…because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image.’ 2Overing’s plea for contextualization would appear to have much the same image in mind. But in the pursuit of this, we lose any possibility of characterizing the power of art as transcendence, something which still needs to be debated within anthropology.